These, and how many others, have not passed by that corner in Piccadilly where Stewart’s stands; they are but the ghosts of the beauties and exquisites of a bygone day that loiter there—for in this strenuous age no one dawdles—all is hurry and confusion, and the idle stroller, other than Thespian, is almost a thing of the past. Let us for the moment try to imitate our forbears and “take a walk down Piccadilly.”
What changes have not taken place in this street of streets! It was known by the quaint name it still bears as early as 1633, for Gerarde in his famous Herbal, mentions “the wild bu-glosse,” that “grows about the drie ditch-bankes about Pickadilla.” This is not the place to go into the mysteries of nomenclature, and many have been the theories as to the origin of the name; but that is probably the correct solution which traces it to the ruffs called Pickadils, worn by the gallants of James’s and Charles’s time. Blount in his “Glossography” (1656) thus speaks of the matter: “A Pickadil is that round hem, or the several divisions set together about the skirt of a garment or other thing; also a kind of stiff collar, made in fashion of a band. Hence, perhaps, the famous ordinary near St. James’s, called Pickadilly, took denomination, because it was then the utmost, or skirt house of the suburbs, that way.”
Thus Blount, and I think we may leave it at that. We shall return later on to the “famous ordinary,” which was known as Pickadilla Hall, and was situated at the north-east corner of the Haymarket: now we are on our way west, like the wise men of old.[1]
ALBEMARLE STREET.
The first tributary street we come to is Albemarle Street, formed, at the same time as Bond Street, about 1684, by Sir Thomas Bond, on the site of Clarendon House, which the great Lord Clarendon built from the designs of Pratt, according to Evelyn, on ground which had been granted him by Charles II., in 1664. The Diarist had “never seen a nobler pile,” and he had every opportunity for criticising it thoroughly as, on one occasion, the Chancellor himself showed him all over it; and the extant views of it fully confirm Evelyn’s enthusiasm. The populace, however, saw in the great place the results of bribery and corruption, and Dunkirk House, Holland House, and Tangier House, were titles freely applied to it. On Clarendon’s death, the house was sold (1675) to the second duke of Albemarle (the son of the great Monk) for £26,000 (it had cost £40,000 originally). In consequence of extravagance in all sorts of ways, however, its new owner was not long able to keep it, and he in turn sold it, it is said, for £20,000, to Sir Thomas Bond, who pulled it down and built Albemarle Street (then called Albemarle Buildings), and Bond Street on its site. Evelyn, on September 18th, 1683, notes that he “walked to survey the sad demolition of Clarendon House, that costly and only sumptuous palace of the late Lord Chancellor Hyde,” “where,” he adds, “I have often been so cheerful with him and sometimes so sad.”
Clarendon Hovse
(From a print of the period.)
Albemarle Street, “of excellent new buildings, inhabited by persons of quality,” as the New View of London (1708) describes it, has had some interesting inhabitants. Here, in 1712, Sir William Wyndham and his family escaped in their night clothes from the fire that destroyed his house, for which he had given £6,000, as he told Swift, when many rare pictures and other valuables were destroyed; here, in Lord Grantham’s house, lived for a time the Prince of Wales, afterwards George II., until he moved to Leicester House. Bishop Berkeley was lodging at Mr. Fox’s (an apothecary’s) in this street, from 1724 to 1726, as he records in his “Literary Relics,” and Sir Richard Mead, who formed that fine collection of drawings subsequently added to the Royal Collection, resided here in 1720.
Many years later the Duc de Nivernois was lodging in the street, and here received on one occasion Gibbon “more as a man of letters than as a man of fashion,” much to the latter’s chagrin. Lord Bute, another minister who became, as Clarendon had done, an object of popular hatred, was living here in 1764; and there is a story told by Lord Malmesbury, that when a Mr. Calvert asked in the House of Commons “Where is Athens? What is become of Lacedæmon?” some member of the Opposition called out that “they had gone to Albemarle Street.”
It is obviously possible to do little more than mention the names of some of the other distinguished residents in Albemarle Street. Here lived Zoffany, the painter, who executed, about this period, a portrait of Wilkes, “looking—no, squinting—at his daughter,” as Walpole records: Robert Adam, the architect of so many fine dwellings, died here, in 1792, and his brother James two years later, at No. 13; Charles James Fox was living here when Rogers first knew him; Sir James Mackintosh was at No. 26, on his return from India in 1811, and “Leonidas” Glover, died in a house here, in 1785.